Russia and Ukraine’s phony Gogol war

The rival celebrations of Nikolai Gogol’s 200th anniversary in Russia and in Ukraine seem to have missed the point. The current attempts by Ukrainian cultural nationalists to claim Gogol as one of their own are contradictory, especially since Ukrainian schoolchildren must read Gogol only in a Ukrainian translation. But equally, the boorish Russian rejection of Gogol’s Ukrainian roots ignores the heterogeneity at the heart of the Russian culture: not only was Gogol, who founded the modern Russian prose tradition, a Ukrainian, but his friend Alexander Pushkin, who fathered the modern poetic tradition, was the descendant of an African.

In his first incarnation, Gogol was the Ukrainian Walter Scott: fascinated by his native country’s former martial traditions, but politically—100 percent committed to the union with Russia.

The secret to understanding Nikolai Gogol’s relationship with Ukraine lies not in his home village of Sorochyntsi in the Poltava district, but a long way outside of both Ukraine and Russia, in Scotland, in a picturesque locality in the Borders region called Abbotsford.

It was here that in 1815 the “north British” writer Walter Scott wrote Waverly, the world’s first historical novel describing, in brilliant technicolor, the glorious but doomed 1745 uprising of the Scottish Highland clans against the Hanoverian dynasty in London. The novel succeeded where the uprising had failed – in rescuing the Gaelic culture of the Scottish highlands from the tip of a historical eraser. Scotland’s highlands and Western Isles were transformed from a despised mountain desert into one of Europe’s premiere tourist attractions – arguably the site where modern tourism was born. From the Urals to the Atlantic, Scott’s potboiler – written to pull its author out of bankruptcy – was the first commercial bestseller – the Da Vinci Code of the early 19th century.

The Russian Empire fell as much under the spell of the “Scottish enchanter” as the rest of Europe, and his influence shaped a generation of writers. Derring-do, historical drama and battlefield action ceased to be the preserve of poetry and painting, and became subjects that a novel (until then, largely an epistolary form for female edification) could handle just as well, if not better.

When writing his Ukrainian masterpiece Taras Bulba, Gogol was thus inspired less by the Ukrainian folk culture than by this new Scott-induced craze for the romantic past and the historical novel sweeping across fashionable Europe. Taras Bulba slotted in perfectly. It bears witness not so much to Gogol’s Ukrainian roots, as to his European consciousness.

But this is not to say that both Gogol and Scott were apolitical. The opposite is true. Scott’s politics were Gogol’s politics: unionist. Unionist politics are evident in the very structure of the “historical novel” a la Scott and Gogol. The antiquarian interest in history the writers demonstrate focuses on the color and exoticism of the past as such – as having passed. Gogol’s love of the Cossack tradition had the same register as Scott’s fascination with the Highlanders – a stirring evocation of something splendid gone forever.

Scott’s and Gogol’s politics were the very opposite of nascent nationalism. Their politics was committed to the irrevocable union of their native countries, Scotland and Ukraine respectively, with their larger neighbors, England and Russia. Indeed, Scott was so stalwartly a “unionist” figure that no eyebrows were raised when in the Scottish capital of Edinburgh, the second city of the British Empire, a hulking great memorial was erected in his honor in 1846 – shortly after the 1844 Irish famine had once more made nationalism a potent threat to Britain.

Likewise Gogol, far from being a visionary precursor of Ukrainian nationalism, would have been its antagonist. The second version of the novel Gogol published in 1844, with a pro-Russian slant missing in the original, only makes explicit this position.

Russians like to use this fact to prove that the great writer had more in common with Russia than with Ukraine. This boorish Russian rejection of Gogol’s Ukrainian roots is epitomized for the Ukrainians by former the Gazprom head, prime minister, and now Russia’s ambassador to Ukraine Viktor Chernomyrdin. In a recent interview to a Ukrainian glossy, Chernomyrdin slated Ukrainian cultural politics, thereby demonstrating profound ignorance of the issue. “For instance, let’s take the case of a student here who decides to read the recent Ukrainian translation of Gogol’s Taras Bulba,” said Chernomyrdin. “What does he discover? In this so-called ‘translation’ all mentions of Rus are omitted. And the student will really believe that this is what Gogol wrote. But Nikolai Vasilevich did not write this. He couldn’t have written it. This is the result of ‘diplomatic’ translations – it’s a disgrace.”

In saying this, Chernomyrdin simply appears to be unaware of the fact that there was a first version of Taras Bulba. In the first version, the Russian national theme, so strong in the second, is almost absent, and Gogol’s celebration of Cossack derring-do takes pride of place. And whereas in the second, the hero Taras Bulba is burnt alive by the Poles, with a vision of a Russian ruler coming who will set wrongs to right, in the first version he lives to fight another day. “Our favorite ambassador yet again wanted only the best,” said Vasil Shlyar, a translator and well-known Ukrainian writer. “But the main thing is that Gogol [who famously burnt his sequel to the classic Dead Souls shortly before his death] never burned the first edition of Taras Bulba. Nor did the first edition burn Taras Bulba himself.”